Cartographies of Remembering

Marina Tabassum (b. 1969, Dhaka, Bangladesh) is an acclaimed architect and educator who has received numerous international recognitions for her contributions in the field of architecture. She graduated in 1995 from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology. Prior to founding Marina Tabassum Architects (MTA) in 2005, Tabassum was a founding partner of the Dhaka-based firm URBANA between 1995 and 2005 with Kashef Chowdhury. In 1997, URBANA won the national competition to design the Independence Monument of Bangladesh and the Museum of Independence under the Public Works Department and the Ministry of Liberation War Affairs. Tabassum’s practice remains consciously contained in size — prioritising climate, context, culture and history — undertaking a limited number of projects per year.

Tabassum is a Professor at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. She held the Norman Foster Chair at Yale University in 2023 and has taught as a visiting professor at numerous universities, including the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, USA; the University of Toronto, Canada; and BRAC University, Bangladesh. She received an Honorary Doctorate from the Technical University of Munich, Germany, and served as academic director at the Bengal Institute for Architecture, Landscapes and Settlements between 2015 and 2021.

Tabassum’s pursuit for the ‘architecture of relevance’ has won her numerous awards including the Soane Medal from the United Kingdom; Arnold Brunner Memorial Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; the Gold Medal of the French Academy of Architecture; and the Jameel Prize from the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. She won the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2016 for the Bait ur Rouf Mosque and has served as a member of the Steering Committee of the Aga KhanAwards for Architecture from 2017 to 2022 and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (RSA). In 2024, Tabassum was included in TIME Magazine’s ‘100 Most Influential People’.

Tabassum chairs the Executive Board of Prokritee, a fair-trade organisation that promotes crafts and provides livelihood to thousands of women artisans of Bangladesh. She is the founding chairperson of the Foundation for Architecture and Community Equity (F.A.C.E), a non-for-profit organisation that focuses on climate adaption and architecture’s agency and responsibility in providing dignified living conditions for marginalised populations. F.A.C.E is currently working with communities to build mobile modular housing (known as Khudi Bari) in various geographically and climatically challenged locations in Bangladesh.

Tabassum’s work is currently the subject of a travelling exhibition organised by Architektur Museum der TUM, Munich, showing in Lisbon and Delft. She has previously presented work at Whitechapel Gallery, London (with Rana Begum, 2019); Sharjah Architecture Triennale (2019); and Venice Architecture Biennale (2018). Her work has been published by ArchiTangle; Harvard Graduate School of Design; ORO Editions; and Lars Müller Publishers among others.

Arpita Singh was born in 1937 in Baranagar, then Bengal Presidency, now West Bengal, and moved to New Delhi with her family in 1946 where she has since lived and worked. Singh is a pioneering artist of post-independence era India and has influenced generations of artists, thinkers, and creatives. After graduating in Fine Arts from Delhi Polytechnic in 1959, she worked as a textile designer at the Weaver’s Service Centre, part of the Handloom Board of India. Singh regularly exhibited with fellow artists Nilima Sheikh, Nalini Malani, and Madhvi Parekh. 

Singh’s work has been regularly exhibited in India and internationally, including the 2019 retrospective Submergence: In the Midst of Here and There at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi. The artist has been included in group exhibitions at the Barbican, UK (2024); Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain (2022); Centre Pompidou, France (2021); M+ Museum, Hong Kong (2021–2023); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Spain (2013); Peabody Essex Museum, USA (2013); Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Japan (2012); and Royal Academy of Arts, UK (1982). She has also participated in the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, India (2022); Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2021); Asia Society Triennial, USA (2020–21); Havana Biennial, Cuba (1986); and Triennale–India (1975, 1978). She was awarded a fellowship at Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, India in 2014 and was honoured with several awards, including the Padma Bhushan (2011); the Parishad Samman from the Sahitya Kala Parishad, New Delhi (1991); and the Kalidas Samman, Bhopal (1991). 

Osman Ahmed is a London-based editor and creative consultant. Formerly Fashion Director at i-D and a senior reporter at Evening Standard and The Business of Fashion, Ahmed is widely recognised for their cultural criticism and in-depth reporting, examining how design aesthetics intersect with broader cultural, political and social movements. Their writing has regularly appeared in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Vogue and the Financial Times, where they have profiled some of the world’s leading designers, such as Raf Simons, Rei Kawakubo, Miuccia Prada, Giorgio Armani, Virgil Abloh and Yohji Yamamoto.

In 2020, Ahmed’s interest in global subcultures led them to launch and present the i-Dentity podcast, a documentary series exploring the origins and influence of music and nightlife subcultures such as Dancehall, Buffalo, Techno, Acid House, Hip-Hop, Jungle and Indie. Today, Ahmed remains a global authority on fashion and culture, working across different forms of media and platforms. They collaborate with leading brands including Chanel and Gucci, advising on storytelling, strategy, and creative direction to bring depth and authenticity to global campaigns and partnerships.

Sutapa Biswas is an Indian-born British artist based in London. For over four decades, her work has explored the entanglements of colonial histories with gender, race and domestic life, often drawing on personal and diasporic narratives. Working across painting, film, drawing, and photography, Biswas draws on a rich range of global artistic traditions to interrogate power and identity. Her landmark works include Housewives with Steak-knives (1984–85) and Lumen (2021), and she has exhibited at Tate Britain, BALTIC, Autograph, and internationally. Biswas is a recipient of the Yale Center for British Art Visiting Scholars Award and the Art Fund’s Moving Image Fund.

Puer Deorum is an interdisciplinary artist whose work navigates the tension  between weight and ephemerality, touching upon the omnipresent scope of mortality. Drawing from their cultural context, and referencing psycho-socio-political geographies, they challenge homogenous understandings of time, oscillating between linear and fluid methods. Through incantations of love, embodied feeling, and interpretive action, Puer Deorum explores temporality via endurance, duration, and dream-like states. Their practice amplifies (inter)personal experience, evoking new ways of sensing and inhabiting time.  Their work has been presented at institutions and festivals including Whitechapel Gallery (London), Serendipity Arts Festival (Goa), Les Urbaines (Lausanne), Hugo Boss (London), and Instrument Inventors (The Hague). Solo exhibitions: Filet Gallery (London), Quench Gallery (Margate). In 2023, they curated and produced ELO MELO, a multi-media festival in London across Whitechapel Gallery and Toynbee Hall, with Oitij-jo Collective. Deorum has also contributed to talks and panel discussions at Tate Modern, and Glastonbury Festival.

Nabihah Iqbal is a musician, composer, broadcaster, and curator whose interdisciplinary work spans electronic and classical music, art, and cultural programming. Trained in History and Ethnomusicology (School of Oriental and African Studies) and History (M.Phil, Cambridge), she left a path in law to pursue music full-time. Her 2023 album DREAMER received international critical acclaim, and she has since performed at Glastonbury, Sydney Festival, MoMA PS1, and the Southbank Centre, where she premiered her first classical work in 2025. A long-standing resident on NTS Radio and frequent BBC host, Iqbal’s practice extends into visual art and curating, with collaborations across institutions such as Tate, the Barbican, and Serpentine. She was Guest Director of Brighton Festival 2023 and is the founder of Glory To Sound, a platform for performance and conversation. Iqbal sits on the boards of the ICA and Hand Of, a music education charity.

Mohammed Z. Rahman (he/they) is a British-Bengali artist based in London. His work weaves together  socio-political and personal histories through the lens of the domestic. With a background in social anthropology (BA, School of Oriental and African Studies), Mohammed approaches his practice as a visionary, intimate and political force—placing the ordinary and fantastical in conversation to  explore labour, globality, queerness, biography, and socio-historical perspectives. Rahman is a recipient of the Tate Frieze Fund 2024 and the UK Government Art Collection London Gallery Weekend Fund.

Arinjoy Sen is an architectural designer based in London, who pursues  research through an art-based practice. Sen’s artistic and spatial practice investigates the politics and aesthetics of architecture and the instrumentalisation of spatial agents in socio-cultural and political contexts. His work and interests have an acute focus on contested landscapes, citizenship, migration, narrative, and spatial justice. Drawing plays a crucial role in Sen’s practice—serving as a tool  for exploring space and narrative, and as a form of resistance against the erasure of marginalised histories.

Sanam Sindhi is an independent archivist and researcher based between India and the United States. Disillusioned with the fashion industry’s tokenistic approaches to diversity, Sindhi founded the South Asia Archive in 2018 as an extension of a personal research practice years in the making. What started as an independent, digital study has quickly grown into an expansive initiative encompassing public programming, consultancy and preservation amongst other projects. At the core of Sindhi’s practice is  a desire to understand and articulate the liminality that shapes contemporary South Asian identity, ontology, and cultural production.

Devika Singh is an art historian, critic and curator specialising in modern and contemporary art, with a focus on South Asia and transnational histories. She is co-lead of the MA in Curating at The Courtauld, and was previously Curator of International Art at Tate Modern, where she led major research initiatives and acquisitions on South Asian art. Singh has curated exhibitions and displays across global institutions including Tate Modern, Dhaka Art Summit, and Kettle’s Yard, and her writing has appeared in frieze, Art Press, and international museum catalogues. Her book International Departures: Art in India after Independence was published in 2023. She is also joint editor of the Oxford Art Journal and sits on several juries and advisory boards.

Himali Singh Soin is a writer and artist based between London and Delhi. Her practice  uses metaphors drawn from outer space and the natural environment to construct imaginary cosmologies of interferences and entanglement. Through this, she thinks through ecological loss and displacement, seeking shelter in the radical possibilities of love. She has exhibited at Hayward, Whitechapel and Mimosa House, London; TBA21, Madrid; Khoj, Delhi; Venice Biennale and Dhaka Art Summit among others. Her recent solo exhibition at The Art Institute of Chicago explored transnational nuclear culture. Her current research on the metaphysics of salt, developed with her collective Hylozoic/Desires, was shown at Sharjah Biennale 16 and Somerset House in London. Their show, The Hedge of Halomancy—a meditation on the British Empire’s planting of  a vegetal border across India is up at Tate Britain until August 2025. 

South Asia Archive is an archive, consultancy, and ongoing research initiative that uncovers and examines a neglected history of contemporary South Asian—one shaped by alternative visual cultures, sartorial politics, global dialogue, and counter-narratives of the subcontinent and its diaspora. Through programming, collaborative projects, and preservation of overlooked materials, the archive functions as both a reference point and a generative platform for a diverse network of artists, researchers and thinkers seeking to engage with and expand this history.